

Class .W. 



Author 



Title 



Imprint 



GPO 16—7164 



LIBRARY OF CX)NGRESS 



QDDnnOSlEb 




1 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 



AN ADDRESS 



DELIVERED AT THE 



ANNUAL COMMEICEMEIT 



University of Michigan, 

June 25. 1885. 
By the Rev. Dr. S. L. CaldweU, 

PRESIDENT OF VASSAR COLLEGE. 



ANN ARBOR, MICH.: 

PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD OF REGENTS. 
1885. 



LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH LIFE. 



AN ADDRESS 



I /^ X, /^ ..... ^ .M ^. O 



DELIVERED AT THE 



AHUAL COMMEICEMEIT 



OF THE 



University of Michigan, 

June 25, 1885, 
By the Rev. Dr. S. L. Caldwen, 

PRESIDENT OF VASSAR COLLEGE. 



ANN ARBOE, MICH.: 

PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD OF REGENTS. 
1885. 






Courier I*riiitir».g Hoixse, A-ntx A-rbor, AdCicli. 






Litemtupe in Aooount with Life. 



KEV. DR. S. L. CALDWELL. 



President Angell, Ladies and Gentlemen : 

The day which calls together the sons of a College to cele- 
brate the privilege of their calling as scholars is bright beyond 
most other days in the calendar. It is sacred to thought, to rea- 
son, to inquiry, to good learning, to liberal culture, to one of the 
first interests of life. It is the birthday of a new generation of 
students, who fill the vacancies which the years leave. It calls 
back the students of other days, many of them perhaps remem- 
bering studies which more exacting pursuits long ago brought 
to an end, but while mourning the disappointment of their young 
dream, feeling for a day at least that they were once scholars, 
and have a name and a place in the goodly fellowship. It brings 
here the guardians, the authorities, the graduates, the students, 
the friends of this great University, to exchange congratulations, 
to auspicate the future, to praise the scholar's calling and work. 

Eis Athenas was the choral strain of the Thracian maids. 
Up to Athens we come, to find under these oaks of Michigan a 
philosophy as genuine and as high as under the olives of the Aca- 
demy ; to drink again the old inspiration ; to renew the sweet 
communion which belongs to every spot where study and learn- 
ing find a home. And if many come who have served other gods 
than the classic ones to which they made their young vows ; who 
have found less room than they expected for the liberal culture 
which was their early aspiration; who to day confess that they 
know more of life than of letters, that aff'airs have displaced stu- 
dies, that they have denied to scholarship what has been given 
to more tempting or more urgent pursuits, surely they belong 
here by birthright as by sympathy, and come up to Athens to 
pay, at least, the tribute which every good citizen owes to aca- 



demic institutions and culture. Life has taken some flavor and 
charm from early studies, even where it has limited or closed 
them. Life has been making use of academic training in the 
midst of demands hostile to its continuance. And every student 
who has been drawn into the most practical and unclassic pur- 
suits has at least his memory of earlier and dearer things, and 
in his departure may take shelter, at all events, under the author- 
ity of Lord Bacon. " That," he says, " will indeed dignify and 
exalt knowledge, if contemplation and action may be more near- 
ly and strongly conjoined and united together than they have 
been, — a conjunction like unto that of the highest planets, Sa- 
turn, the planet of rest and contemplation, and Jupiter, the 
planet of civil liberty and action." 

So, at least, life and literature seem to come together here 
and face each other to-day; and called as I am by the partiality 
of an old friendship to be the voice of this literary festival, and 
obliged by an unwritten law of the occasion to speak of some in- 
terest of literature, what more natural than to examine the ac- 
count between the two, and especially to calculate how much 
after all literature owes to life. The other course appears to be 
more natural, perhaps suitable. One who has the ear of such 
an assembly seems to owe it to his calling and the occasion to 
plead the claim of letters as against all comers. In a University, 
and on its great holiday, it may seem an offense against the gen- 
ius of the place and the hour to do anything but declare the glory 
of letters. In a time and a country where industrial and politi- 
cal interests carry captive even our scholars, with so many to 
mourn that literature has not had its chance, and that even the 
L^niversities are surrendering the humanities to scientific and 
utilitarian studies, it may seem disloyal to the mistress of our 
vows not to urge the interests of literature, and establish the 
great debt which life, which society, which civilization owes to 
it and whatever i)romotes it. ^But whichever side of the shield 
we face, be it silver or golden, we shall find that it has a reverse, 
and that the two are really debtors to each other. In fact, it 
may prove before we may get through that it is for the sake, 
and in the very interest of literature that life pushes its claim, 
and comes forward into the midst of this literary festival, and be- 
fore this learned court to prove it. We may find that the scholar , 



5* 

the writer, even the poet and the dreamer, is indebted to the 
very life which in so many high ways is indebted to him. 

It has been the fortune of educated men in this country, — 
perhaps to those who to-day revive recollections of years given 
wholly to stud}^, it seems rather a misfortune and hardship — to 
be obliged even on account of their education to mix actively 
with life, and bear a responsible part in its burdens. They are 
the ones who have been drafted for the great exigencies of oui.' 
civilization. They lead a strenuous intellectual life, but it is 
professional, rather than literary or scholastic. They spend 
enough mental power to produce a literature, but in works of 
quite another order. The intellectual energies which have gone 
into American civilization are neither small nor feeble. They 
have been mighty and productive. But they have run to some- 
thing besides literature, whether better or worse. The national 
mind has not yet reached the late, ripe stage when it blooms 
most naturally into these finer products. It has been drawn 
into other fields, with fruit as substantial and necessary, if not 
as brilliant. It has been compelled to adjourn literature till it 
could build a better house to live in. Here was a continent to 
explore and possess. Here were states to be founded. Here 
was a national order to settle, even to fight for. Here was a 
bright, free, multiplying people to educate and evangelize. Here 
were great enterprises in commerce, in industry, in charity. 
Here were great experiments in education, in government, in 
religion, in social order, in which literature could have little 
weight. Thought, knowledge, genius, have been put into works 
of construction, rather than of culture; into cities, roads, ships? 
the school, the church, the state. This immense, eager life, hot 
with irrepressible energies, fighting with the wilderness and 
pushing it westw^ard, breaking out into sadden cities, into states 
which are empires almost as soon as they are born, tasked with 
the necessities of a new order of society, stimulated by the pas- 
sions of a free democracy, excited by unusual opportunities, 
running a race with the best things under the sun, charged with 
destinies as great as any which have ever come out of the world's 
greatest ages, it has drawn out all our funds for our immediate 
use, and left little for art and letters. The brain of the nation, 
which is not dull, has been taxed, perhaps extremely, by all this 



6 

great demand. Had the mind of the country been suppressed 
into the small civic and economic opportunities of some Europ- 
ean state, it might have been as fruitful in purely intellectual 
production. The water which might have supplied a few aspir- 
ing and sparkling fountains has been kept on the common level, 
and carried in more humble and useful courses from house to 
house. Our experiment would have come to a miserable con- 
clusion long ago if the genius of the country had been busy in 
literature, breeding scholars instead of men. Literature has been 
compelled to wait, not by lack of intellectual force, not by de- 
fect of inspiration, but by a necessity profound as the providen- 
tial purpose which is creating a new history on this side of the 
planet. In an ideal commonwealth, the scholar might have 
come first. In a small one, with a short course to run, literature 
might have ripened early. But here by profound laws of socio- 
logy this was not possible. By the very laws which made the 
continent so wide, and the race of people so energetic, and the 
problems to be solved so complex, and life here so eager, so new, 
so practical, literary productiveness has been delayed. Either 
literature or life must give way, aud the stronger has taken pos- 
session. 

And then, moreover, literature has been deferred by our 
having one already on hand. That immense intellectual prop- 
erty to which we are heirs compensated for all the loss we have 
suffered by the drafts of practical life. We entered upon our 
career with a literary estate on the other side of the sea large 
enough to supply our needs, while engaged in more exigent 
business. While the active thought of the nation has been de- 
positing itself in inventions, industries, institutions, which carry 
forward civilization, and give hope to mankind, its intellectual 
life has been fed from the accumulated supplies of other lands 
and times, and above all from the stores which English thought 
has gathered in five centuries as much for the benefit of America 
as of England. It has been worth a thousand years of history 
to begin with so much behind us ; that we could start with a 
literature, living and accumulating, wich released the genius of 
this new world for other service. The literature of England is 
ours by every title, except of being born here. It was the cre- 
■^ation of our spiritual ancestry. It comes to us in our language 



in which we were born. It is hardly foreign or imported by 
simply crossing seas. That even gives it the unique flavor 
which native fruit might lack. And a great inheritance it is. 
The ages have furnished no better. Into it are expressed the 
juices of the modern world ; the blood of the good races, the 
though of the most virile and free ones ; the softness of the Nor- 
man and the mettle of the Saxon ; the renascent learning and 
the reformed faith into which the spirit of classic life and the 
finest forces of divine religion descended ; the love of nature 
which belongs to the Englishman, with the love of truth which 
belongs to the loftiest souls. It traverses the whole width of 
human life, almost of the human mind. Rooted in the real, 
standing on the solid earth, it touches the ideal and infinite on 
every side. Mounting into the highest heaven of invention, it 
is never lost in the clouds. Tender and gracious it is with 
' pathos and an infinite humor ; pure and sanative with moral 
wisdom and spiritual faith ; so sincere, so catholic, so vigorous ; 
so opulent in matter, so various in style, so humane in temper. 
And then it uses, and enriches by using, that language spoken 
by more tongues than any cilvilized speech ; that language so 
pliant to all thought ; as stiff as steel and as elastic ; limber to 
love ; sonorous as a bugle to liberty or to war ; now homely and 
now stately ; clear with the lucidity of truth, and yet bright 
with the beams of poetry ; strong enough for any passion, 
and versatile enough for the lightest trifles or the most solemn 
discourse. The literature of England, product of so many 
struggles, of ages so different in their events and their temper, 
of a national life never monotonous, never stagnant, and even 
when insular intense and vigorous, let it come alone, it would 
greatly enrich us. There is very little of it inapt or foreign. 
Later affluents, from France a century ago, from Germany in 
the last fifty years, have run into the main stream of American 
intellect; but it is England which has given us most, and so 
much as to become a very controlling and vital fact in our his- 
tory. For it has released the mind of the country for other 
work. In the midst of this work it has saved us from intellect- 
ual decline. In the beginning, when our fathers were cast up- 
on bare nature, in the periods of transition when the backward 
tendencies which belong to life in a new country in its rude, 



8 

exhausting conflicts with the wilderness were strong, and all 
through the perils of our history, this possession has been a part 
of our salvation. It has helped arrest tendencies toward bar- 
barism, materialism, coarseness. It has kept open the doors in- 
to the ideal world. It has imparted to a new people the virtues 
and inheritances of age. It has kept us from breaking from 
that past in which the wealth of nations often lies. 

I know another opinion has prevailed. This has been 
mourned as an enfeebling and servile dependence on another 
country. It has seemed to forestall original production, and 
postpone an American literature. But is it not a spurious 
Americanism which is willing to refuse what is truly ours, and 
alienate it because it was not born in our woods ? Is it an un- 
American economy to buy in other markets what we cannot 
produce at home ? or to borrow where capital is abundant and 
interest is low ? Should we have gained anything by a protec- 
tive tariff — not on English books, that is bad enough — but by 
excluding English literature, in order to have one of our own? 
That would be the last way to produce one. We need not be so 
jealous of Englishmen. Shakespeare was of the same race, 
and the same class in society, which colonized the shores of 
Massachusetts. Had he been a score of years younger he might 
have come here himself, leaving a copyright of his plays in 
England, where for a time they would certainly have been bet- 
ter relished. Milton and Roger Williams learned languages to- 
gether, and what is better were of the same faith in regard to 
civil and spiritual liberty ; and the poet, like the philosopher 
Berkeley in the next century, might have sought a home on 
the shores of the Narragansett. But this would not have made 
Lycidas or Comus any better poetry, or any more truly ours. 
There is no Atlantic in that ideal world which the poets make. 
English letters belong to all English readers, whether by the 
Thames or the Hudson, whether in the ranches of Colorado or 
the sheep-walks of Australia, wherever a newer England has 
transported itself, as well as in the old home of the race. And 
the debt w^e owe to England we are fast cancelling, and may one 
day wipe out. For with all else we have been producing, in due 
time a literature will come. M. De Tocqueville, one of the most 
philosophical critics of American life, said fifty years ago, " If 



9 

the Americans, retaining the same laws and social condition, 
had had a different origin, and had been transported into 
another country, I do not question they would have had a litera- 
ture. Even as they now are, I am convinced that they will 
ultimately have one." There has been power enough for it, 
original, creative, plastic, but it has cast itself into other than 
literary forms. Secure against intellectual impoverishment, the 
quick mind of the country has applied itself to that which was 
nearest, most necessary, and for the time better. It has bor- 
rowed poets and made our history a poem. It imported litera- 
ture, while it was translating the highest political philosophy 
into a state. It printed its works not in books, but in schools 
taught at the public expense, in the constitutions of forty re- 
publics, in the biography of a nation which in two hundred and 
fifty years has done the work of ages. Invention has not 
gone into Iliads or Infernos ; it has not not done the work of 
Cervantes or Moliere ; but it has saved America from the doom of 
Spain, and the American Revolution from being an anticipa- 
tion of the French ; it has been finding out, instead of paths in 
the ideal, the short roads to commodious life, and universal 
knowledge, and regulated liberty ; giving to unborn millions an 
inheritance such as the country of Dante has waited for a thou- 
sand years. 

Students, jealous for other interests, may lament with not 
unnatural regrets, that so much power has not been put to finer 
uses. It seems as if a nation which grows at the rate of fifty 
millions in a century, might at least produce some great genius, 
and a literature as great. But literature at the expense of life ; an 
excellent poet or two, and no Declaration of Independence ; 
great ideas in books, and no idea of justice or liberty wrought 
into power and a commonwealth ; fine arts and a wretched popu- 
lace ; a Vatican with Raphael in one wing, and a Pope in the 
other ; a nation with more mouths than bread, servile and shift- 
less and decaying, with elegant writers to tell its story and sing 
its poetry, is not the destiny we started for, or for which our 
scholars need vent their unavailing sighs. With literature 
enough, old and new, to satisfy the most eager demand, with as 
much scholarship as we could make use of, with every faculty 
of human nature roused, and rushing to fill the unusual oppor- 



10 

tunity, with more mind let loose and set to school, than in any 
nation on earth, with inventive brains multiplying so rapidly, 
not content to repeat the past, and ready to explore new realms 
of thought as they find those of life occupied, it is hardly neces- 
sary to be mortified yet at the failure of Iliads. The glory of 
action, the triumphs of liberty, the successes of life, are not the 
defeat and cessation of letters, but may become their inspira- 
tion. Indeed, between life and literature there are secret un- 
derstandings and communications, there are preparations and 
nourishments, which will one day appear, and justify the delay. 
That has been first which comes first, and that will follow 
which is all the greater when it follows than when it leads. 
Life, great, original, rich life, will produce literature, because 
they are at last products of the same power, and because litera- 
ture is a product and exponent of life itself. 

It is a notion rather narrow and pedantic that a book is the 
only intellectual work ; that literature and art absorb all the 
genius of the world. There is a great deal of hard study, which 
is not done in colleges. The cotton gin and the telephone cost 
study as much as Mill's Logic, or Darwin's Origin of Species. 
There is a great deal of thought which is not put into libraries. 
Twenty-five years ago we put ideas into guns, which types were 
too slow or too feeble to utter. When the great hours of liberty 
come it is the bayonets which think. Franklin had genius 
enough for a new system of philosophy, or a new departure in 
literature, if he had not given it to the independence and consti- 
tution of his country. The orations of Henry and Burke are 
are great and splendid, but so was the sword of Washington. 
Why should eloquence be greater than generalship ? It was the 
battle of Gettysburg which made Lincoln's speech at Gettys- 
burg the most eloquent utterance of our time. It was the in- 
spiration of Harvard College, not with her sons dreaming in the 
still air of delightful studies, but prompt in the sharp sacrifices 
of war for the country, which made Mr. Lowell in his Commem- 
oration Ode touch the high-water mark in American poetry. 
Ideas do not express themselves more in the forms of language 
than in mechanisms, manners, industries, in emigrations, revo- 
lutions, institutions, worships. Civilization is greater than 
literature, for it not only contains and uses it, but it involves 



11 

an immense expenditure of the same mental force which creates 
it. Civilization is the poetry, philosophy, knowledge, invention, 
thought, the genius and the faith of a people, or an 
epoch, translated, not into words only, but into all possi- 
ble forms. Taste, inventiveness, knowledge, ideas, and what- 
ever mental qualities enter into many forms of literature, are 
also called into action in all civilized and cultivated life. The 
forces which stir and direct the life of our time will at last lodge 
themselves in literature, but they have their birth and action 
outside of it, and will use literature by and by as their expres- 
sion, as they now use more utilitarian vehicles. 

Literature, indeed, may be the best part, and one of the 
highest forms of civilization. It is one of its creative and conser- 
vative forces. Its office is most needful and precious. It fixes 
the fluid forces of thought, and " preserves as in a phial the 
purest efficacy and extraction " of the best minds. It is, as Mil- 
ton has said, " the seasoned life of man." It keeps the con- 
tinuity of the world's thinking, and stores food for new genera- 
tions. It is the ministry of great souls to the multitude of men, 
the motor of thought, the nourishment and the solace of souls 
who cannot create it for themselves. It is a great social factor, 
contributing to the progress of the race. To-day is our tribute 
to it. This University is the acknowledgment of its value. Our 
civilization would be very coarse, and indeed, very poor with- 
out it. And yet the intellectual and spiritual energies which 
put on the robe of life, and go forth to answer the calls of civi- 
lization, are from the same source, and serve a want as true, 
perhaps for a time as sacred, as learning or poetry. They may 
even run ahead of literature, and lay a path for it into the ages 
to come. 

But the peculiarity of literature is that it employs language 
as its single instrument. Into that poetry, philosophy, history, 
put themselves for preservation and for power. And language 
is the child of life, as well as of thought, and must be recruited 
from other than literary sources, or it falls into decay. Writers 
like Dante, and Chaucer, and Luther, turn their native tongue 
into literary form and so fix and purify it. Italy, England, 
Germany, owe their language to their writers. But it was first 
born of the life of the people before the authors used and finished 



12 

it. They found every word almost in common circulation. 
They took up the dialect of the people as it formed itself in their 
common ways and doings. It was the use of living words, with 
the blood still in them, words which came out of the passions 
the conflicts, the necessities, the uses of every day life, which 
gave power to their works. Otherwise they would have been 
remote from men's interests and sympathies, and would have 
perished early. Ideas, however high or remote, find their cloth- 
ing in the common market of life, where the people buy and 
sell. Thought mast go the life for its words, its figures, its com- 
munications. Literature is indebted to life for the instrument 
it uses, and by which it is preserved, and every language must 
have running into it a stream of fresh life from the world, rather 
than from books, or it becomes sterile. " Literary dialects," 
says Professor Max Miiller, " or what are commonly called clas- 
sical languages, pay for their temporary greatness by inevitable 
decay."'^ To adopt his figure, the literary language freezes, as 
a river does, smooth, brilliant, stiff", till in warmer weather, new 
life breaks loose, cracking the crystal surface, and popular lan- 
guage, life a spring flood, revitalizes the old dialect, and gives it 
freshness and new force. Language becomes reflective, " sick- 
lied o'er with the pale cast of thought," it becomes artificial and 
obsolete, when it is withdrawn from the living world and is 
no more the speech of the people. 

We need not think that somehow literature has succeeded 
in adding something to life which is not already in it, and that 
it is something other and finer and stronger in making more out 
of life than it actually contains. Indeed life contains and re- 
veals what does not go into writing, and is itself only a sub- 
limer literature. No history is equal to the facts back of it. 
The life of persons and of nations is full of unwritten histories 
and poetries. There is a poetry in life before it is in words, though 
they be its most cunning and touching revelation. If poetry 
idealizes life, life realizes peotry. The true may surpass the 
invented. I am ready to think a drama of Eacine hardly equal 
to the tragic story of Joan of Arc, and that the mimic Shylock 
or Lear may not surpass the real one. It is indeed the high of- 

*Science of Language. First Series, p. 69. 



13 

fice of poetry to extract and condense tlie finer spirit of beauty 
in the common and homely world about us, 

Clothing the palpable and the familiar 
With golden exhalations of the dawn. 

But as nature precedes art, as a sunset of Claude or 
Turner is no finer than every one of us has seen inflaming the 
west, so genius only discovers with finer insight the beauty and 
sacredness already in life, and invests it with ideal glory. It 
may be the ideal which charms us, but the glory and the mystery 
are there in life, revealed, or unrevealed. This life of man, in 
a single soul, its appetites, its aspirations, its joys, its -glooms, 
its beliefs, its sins, the stamps of heaven, of hell upon it, the 
possibilities, the eternities which are in it ; the complex, mul- 
titudinous life, beating everywhere in co-operative or contending 
energies, the wild, the beautiful, the useful, royal with a glory 
from above the stars, tamed to the touch of Christ's Cross, 
gloomy with wrath or with misery, grand in its efi'orts and 
achievements, in the huts of the poor, in the crowd of the 
streets, flying across seas, bursting into wildernesses, hungry 
and fierce and sour, how much of it, unspeakably great and 
touching even in its wretchedness and its ruin, — this marvelous 
life of man, what study so grand or instructive, what literature 
contains so much, can equal or express it ? Says the historian 
Menzel," Literature mirrors life, not only more comprehen- 
sively, but more clearly than any other monument, because no 
other representation furnishes the compass and depth of 
speech. Yet speech has its limits, and life only has none. The 
abyss of life no book has yet closed up. It is only single 
chords that are struck in you when you read a book ; the 
infinite harmony which slumbers in your life, as in the life of 
all, no book has entirely caught."* 

It is life which furnishes staple for literature, as nature 
does for science. The two may overlap, and pass and repass 
into each other's realm. For science has undertaken, or 
theorists in the interest of science have undertaken, to subject 
not the physical universe only, but the works of human will 
and genius, and the moral world as well, to its inquiries and its 
laws. M. Taine attempts in literature and art, and Mr. Buckle 

* History of German Literature, 1, 15. 



14 

attempts in history, to carry out a theory which brings nature 
and the mind, the genius of Chaucer or Rubens, the civilization 
of Spain or India, into the same realm of law. Comte and Mill 
see no reason why the spontaneousness of human genius, or 
passion, or will should be less scientific than the perturbations 
of Saturn, or the crystallization of a ruby. It is life, the secret 
and law of it, it is the scientific law of literature, as of all human 
production, they are after. 

And literature too, especially poetry, on its side takes 
nature, even after science has opened and turned it inside out, 
and uses it for its own ideal purposes. It adds a precious 
seeing to the eye, so that nature is transfigured by it. It takes 
up nature into itself, into human feeling, and unites it to the 
joys and sorrows and longings of human life. It does not 
describe nature, nor dissect it, but idealizes it. It colors nature 
with its own passions, and it is sad or glad according to the 
poet's moods. So it brings nature and life together, and throws 
upon the outward world the reflections of the life within. It 
deals with nature as science cannot, not after the exactness of 
truth, but after the freedom of impression, giving its own inter- 
pretation to it, and using it, as it uses all other things, after a 
law of its own. 

But after all it is life, rather than nature, which furnishes 
the matter and inspiration for literature. It is not the world 
man lives in, but himself, and whatever life is in him, which 
goes into the creations of genius. It takes in the outward 
world only as it flows through his thought, and is shaped and 
colored by that. And it is not then out of the impersonal 
reason, out of depths of abstract truth back of all human and 
even individual experience ; or if from those far recesses, it is 
truth as it comes into life to be bathed and dressed and used. 
There is a literature which is entirely bloodless and impersonal 
and very much of it comes of no life, and reaches none^ " Sir," 
said Hazlitt, " I am a metaphysician, and nothing makes an 
impression upon me but abstract ideas." There are books like 
Sidney Smith's satirized friend, whose intellects were im- 
properly exposed. They need to be dressed with some form 
and power of life before they can come in contact with men, 
and into the living thought of the world. The book which is 



15 

charged with the life of the author, and the life of his time, 
carries in it the weight and force which make it last. Men's 
hearts go after that which has heart in it, and the touch of 
kindred life. An author's genius will take color and turn irom 
his own experience. This gives it individuality. Unless his 
life is as rich as his genius his work becomes thin and sterile. 
The great poets have a hardy realism which shows that they 
were fed on something beside ambrosia. They are as true to 
life as they are to their genius. Their poetry springs from their 
age as well as themselves. They are in sympathetic relation 
with the thoughts and forces and movements of their time, and 
become its best interpreters. If they go far away, as Milton did 
in his epic, to find subject and characters and epopee, they 
bring their creations into the world in which they live, and 
Adam and Eve, and Kaphael and Abdiel talk like English 
people of the seventeenth century. If Homer ever loses the 
credit of the Iliad it will be because it seems to be born of 
many minds of the Homeric age rather than of his own brain, 
and is too representative to be individual. It is a poet's fancy 
of Coleridge, as he himself acknowledges, that the blind bard 

Beheld the Iliad and the Odysesy 
Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea. 

He saw it all in life before the waves on the Chian shore 
started the inward echoes, and he set to song the great life 
which had beat like a stormier sea on the coast of the Troad. This 
is the charm of the classics, which keep their hold, their yet un- 
shaken hold, on the modern world. Says Dr. Temple, lately 
made Bishop of London, " The classics possess a charm inde - 
pendent of genius. It is not their genius only which makes 
them attractive, it is the classic life, the life of the people of 
that day ; it is the image there only to be seen of our highest 
natural powers in their freshest vigor; it is the unattainable 
grace ol the prime of manhood, it is the pervading sense of 
youthful beauty. Hence, while we have elsewhere great poems 
and great histories, we never find again that universal radiance 
of fresh life which makes even the most commonplace relics of 
classic days models for our highest art." {Essays and Reviews^ 
p, 27.) The Canterbury TaJes of Chaucer are simply the four- 



16 

teenth century of English life put into poetry. The form and 
pressure, the manners and spirit of the time, even its fugitive 
aspects are'caught and photographed. For this is the office of 
all literature and its use, that it catches and keeps what other- 
wise would evaporate and be lost. That literature of power, 
which De Quincey, (Essay on Pope^) so finely discriminates 
from that of knowledge, is the literature of life, which describes 
the manners, unfolds the relations, reveals the secrets, comes 
home to the buiness and bosoms of men, and sheds light on their 
true life and destiny. It is the exponent and translator of life, 
which without it would disappear. And its great writers are 
those who, if their souls, like Milton's, were " like a star and 
dwelt apart," were also mixed closest with the deeper life of 
their time. Karely, perhaps, never, is individual genius able 
to escape the influence, to withstand the spirit of its age, that 
larger genius which embraces and breathes through all its 
children. The life of an epoch is mightier than any soul in it, 
and stamps itself into the thought and words of even those who 
come into it puissant to rule, or dreadful to purify. The verse 
which seems spontaneous as the blowing of winds, or the growth 
of clover, takes always some hue and temper, some stamp of 
conformity or resistance, from the nature and society, the place 
and the period in which it was born. The poet of the Merri- 
mack and the poets of the Charles have not only enriched 
American literature, but have illustrated American life. The 
struggle with slavery beats and shouts in the verse of Whittier, 
as it did not even in the clash of swords. As Mr. Lowell this 
summer leaA^es England, an English writer has said of The Big- 
low Papers, " They give the most perfect literary expression to 
a great secular movement, and will always remain as the inter- 
pretation of it, throwing more light on its causes and characters 
than the records of historians, or the dissertations of moralists." 
This great conflict of ideas more and more taking possession of 
the second generation of American life in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, and precipitated at last in a bloody shower has perhaps not 
yet produced all its spiritual fruits. The periods of literary fruit- 
fulness do not always synchronise with those of aroused and 
strenuous action. It would seem as if the era of great and 
crowded life must necessarily quicken genius, and issue in a 



17 

richer harvest. But it may be too tempestuous, and poetry may 
wait for the calm warmth of the Indian summer to rij^en. It 
may exhaust rather than nourish. Its violent passions may 
burn rather than warm, and break the crust for the fertile vine- 
yards of the next generation. It may force intellectual action 
away from poetry. It may spread it o ver a vast space and great 
numbers, while if it were compressed into a narrower and more 
peaceful life it would flower into a richer and rarer literature. 
It may emancipate political rather than iDoetic tendencies. It 
may start inspirations which will pervade the national life, and 
run into literature at last. But by and by it will show that 
genius, schola?:ship, literature cannot escape the forces which 
belong to a period so eventful as the last fifty years. 

The latest and fullest development of literary activity in 
recent times is in prose fiction. The writing which covers most 
paper, reaches most eyes, and is devored with most satisfaction 
to-day is the novel. For the majority, the philosophers, the 
historians, the poets, stand aside for the novelist. You may say 
his touch is superficial, and that people never return to the best 
novel as they do the great poems and histories. You may say 
that the truth in it is thin and not deep, that it takes hold of the 
fancies of readers rather than their convictions, and that out of 
the crowd of them few novels survive a twelve-month. After 
all has been said, and after it is said, as it may be, that the 
novel has not yet attained its ideal function as a teacher of truth, 
nowhere is life found in such varietj^, in such extremes of 
pathos and humor, tragedy and comedy, in such truth to itself 
In history, in biography, in philosophy, there may be more fact, 
and in form at least more reality. But the novel is the 
book of life, and when it is at its best, of actual life. Life sup- 
plies its motive, its story, its persons. Life gives it charm and 
power. Whatever it may have in it, noble truth, rhetor- 
ical beauty, ingenious plot, if it has not actual life, men and 
Avomen as we know them, the passions, the doings of living men, 
it fails. If it does not interpret life, and make us know it bet- 
ter, if it does not let us into the secrets of life, not of the day only^ 
but of that life which in its ruling passions is the same all days 
and everywhere, it has no use, and goes to kindle the fire in the; 
kitchen. It is waste paper, and waste writing, for it does not 



18 

speak out of life into life. But in its multitudinous progeny, it 
is a testimony to the 'power which in later times life has ac- 
quired over literature. It tells how much more men want to 
know about themselves, that not satisfied with biography and 
history, the imagination has been set at work so industriously 
to invent what literature in no other way could supply. 

Literature comes out of life. 80 it returns thither with its 
gifts, to become the minister as well as the interpreter of life. 
It is not tributary simply to intellectual culture. It nourishes 
the mind ; but it does no more. It serves the uses of life, its 
finer and and more spiritual uses. It cannot be weighed in the 
scales of the market, though literature has its mercantile value. 
But the five pounds for which Paradise Lost was sold was 
enough for it if had not been above all price. Books are worth 
not what they sell for, but the contribution they make to the 
better life of men. Literature has come to this test, as does 
everything in the world. Genius must obey the same law with 
much coarser things. It must be of use. It may be spontane- 
ous in its work, as the highest genius always is. It may have 
no conscious purpose of utility, of anything but to sing its song, 
and say its say, as the new hay is sweet, or the stream runs at 
its will. But to this test it must come at last. All literature 
that lives, and is cherished in human love, has this quality. It 
is of power to breed better thoughts, to take us out of ourselves a 
little, a little above ourselves, to help us forget, to help us re- 
member, "to inform man in the best reason of living," to make 
his life great with thought, with knowledge, with spiritual ex- 
cellence. Life is better than learning, is the test and the end 
of it. Life is greater than literature, as all the rivers run into 
the sea, and it is never full. The ambition to be a learned man, 
with no reference to use, to life, is no better than the ambition 
to be a fat man. They are somewhat the same. The book 
which answers no use of life, of real and good high life, has no 
use at all. If it neither excites, nor expands, nor chastens, nor 
nourishes, if it is not constructive as well as instructive, if it 
does not beget more life, if it does not invigorate the energies of 
the rational spirit, let it go back to the paper maker. Litera- 
ture is a servant, and may serve noble or mean interests. It is 
an instrument, and has its part in the |reat struggles and 



19 « 

achievements of the age. It gives direction and anchorage to 
the thoughts of men. It creates influences, a soil, and intellect- 
ual climate more potent than any phj^sical circumstance. It 
may answer base uses and the best. It may be the word of 
life or death which quickens or petrifies centuries. But its 
splendor, its virtue, its end is to beget more life and fuller. It 
is the chariot and not the goal. It is a thing by the way, and at 
the end is life, true, large, beautiful, eternal. 

But literature is liable to perils and mischiefs, from which 
it is saved by contact with life and the real world. There is a 
great deal of healthy literature, and a great deal that is morbid 
and lacks sanity. Its diseases come generally from too much 
thought and too little life. Its blood is thin and sublimated. It 
is sick for want of air and exposure. It is too iine-spun and 
speculative. It wants an infusion of sense and mother- wit. It 
needs to touch the ground, however far it flies toward the moon. 
It must go out of doors into the hard and wholesome life of the 
world. Life is curative and medicinal. It corrects the bad hu- 
mors, the flighty fancies, the wild excesses, the morbid tenden- 
cies of literature. It mixes the practical lessons of experience 
with ideal truth. I know there is an ideal to which the poet 
must go for his law, and not to his own times and society. He 
must descend into his time as a minister of beauty and 
teacher of truth, who has been in to look at the invisible, and 
listen to the voice of the Eternal. He is to bring down into life 
what he does not find in it. He is to adjust his compass and lay 
his course by celestial observations. Dark will be the day when 
the poets and thinkers and teachers of the w^orld surrender to 
the actual, and know no law but experience. Dismal enough is 
that invasion of realism which in art, in poetry, in fiction, is one 
of the worst distempers. When the ideal departs, life expires. 
But they need to keep hold of the solid facts of life, to steady, 
to correct, to orient themselves by. The aeronaut in the far at- 
mosphere is still held by the law^ of gravitation, and must depend 
on that to bring him back from his high visions. The scholar 
must temper study with some part in affairs. Scholarship needs 
to be balanced by some knowledge of the world. It becomes 
very dry and dusty when it retreats into the world of books, and 
forgets that there is a great world outside of the libraries where 



20 

the very life is still going on which it is studying after it has been 
preserved and embalmed in literature. The new studies are giv- 
ing Greek a hard fight to hold its place, its traditional and proper 
place, in tHe college course. It will not win unless it can show 
that it belongs to a practical as well as a scholastic education. 
The Greek literature is such a part of the world's thought and 
speech as cannot be spared, as would be an irreparable loss to 
liberal education, to that ''complete and generous education," 
which," as Milton says, "fits a man to perform justly, skillfully 
and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of 
peace and war." It is because there is still life and immortal 
youth in the languages we call dead, that they are and are to be, 
the study, not of antiquarians, but of all scholars who hope to 
take hold of the living world. 

And so it is life which is not only curative, but preservative, 
and really gives literature its immortality. There is some vitality 
in it by which it survives the doom of decay which falls upon 
man and his books. Lost literature enough there is, which has 
gone down into Lethe and devouring time. It perished, not so 
much for lack of types to preserve it, but because it had no hold 
on men's love and memory. Long ages before the invention of 
printing it was said that of the making of books there is no end. 
But it is not the constant making, but the constant mortality of 
books, which is most suggestive. They dropped out of the 
memory because they dropped out of the life of men. They 
perished because their use was transient, and the" life in them 
was small and brief. They died simply because they had nothing 
in them to keep them alive, to fasten them to the perpetuated 
thought and life of mankind. They could not keep with the 
new thoughts, the new life of the world, and so fell back and 
were lost. The secret of the longevity of the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures, of the best classics, of the literature which every generation 
reads, is in something more than their style, or even their matter. 
It is the universal human element in them, which comes home 
to men everywhere and always. It is life in them, human life, 
which never wearies, which always delights ; it is that touch of 
nature which makes nations kin, and all the ages one ; it is the 
life of great souls, which have not only been imbued with the 
Zeitgeist of a single age or country, but have drunk into the life 



21 

of humanity, and have known ho\v to piit. that life into words, 
into the language of their tinie, bywhich/iT has" Lecoihe tlie- 
language of all time. It is the key which Ben Jonsoh gave to 
the immortality of Shakespeare, 

And for his poesy, 'tis so rammed with life, 
That it shaU gather strength with being. 
And live hereafter more admired than now. 

And when Jesus said, The words that I speak unto you, 
they are spirit, and they are life, he explained the immortal fresh- 
ness and power of the Gospel. It is truth married to life, it is living 
truth married to living words, it is literature born out of life and 
into life, which survives every other work of man, and has a 
vitality which belongs not to forms and letters, but to a spiritual 
essence. 

This is the hour of scholars, when a company of them, in 
many departments, take the honors of the University, and go 
their way. They have been students, and please God, let them be 
students still. They have been trained to scholarship, of one 
land and another ; let it find its mission. For it remains to you 
not only to find its increase, but to find its use. Here is life, 
and you carry into it what it greatly needs. Here is truth, and 
you have not learned all of it yet.. Think not that possibility 
in either is concluded ; that literature has all been written, that 
life with its great opportunities is exhausted. The last word has 
not been said, the best deed has not been done. There is yet 
truth, there is yet life, great, rich, untried. They wait for your 
coming. Be it yours to use what you have learned, and to turn 
truth into life. Always may this great University stand, with 
doors opening both ways, inward toward all truth, known or un- 
known, outward toward life, and the wants of the world. Always 
in her training may the reconciliation be made between thought 
and action, letters and life. She sends forth her children, not as 
literary dilettanti, 

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, 
Or with the tangles of Xeasra's hair ; 

not to be mere critics while others do the w^ork of the world ; 
not to be theorists only, who tell how it is to be done ; but as 
serious scholars, who learn that they may teach, who study into 



22 



the best things, that the best things may be done ; who join good 
learning and useful living ; who will increase the debt the coun- 
try owes her scholars, and repay the debt which literature owes 
to life. 




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